


Consanguinity

by Auntarctica



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: A twisted pleasure, Angst, Brotherly magnanimity, Devotion, Love, M/M, POV First Person, Rivalry, Topping from the Bottom, Twincest, Vergil POV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-10 00:49:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Auntarctica/pseuds/Auntarctica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes I think we are like Wrath, o my brother; stubbornly holding on to a heavy and precarious hatred that will ultimately destroy us both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

I remember God; his face was broad and insincere.

In his house, we were like children, unable to reach the table. We sat at his feet, and awaited his crumbs. He patted our heads and murmured vague endearments that had no affiliation with love.

His radiance was blinding, as you might expect; his manner serene and aloof. In his face were three eyes that looked straight ahead. We dared not displease him, for he was monolithic. When he sat, his head touched the white vaults of the ceiling. When he walked, his shoulders dusted the sky.

Once, he whispered in my ear and I forgot your name.

It sounds like a fable, brother, I admit. Something we were told when we were young, perhaps—a macabre little anecdote to buy Mother a moment of peace. Indeed, as I stand here now and watch the liquid sky, I am tempted to believe it was little more than a coma dream. But self-deception is an indulgence I have always disdained, and I will not deign to employ it now.

Little of that reality remains in me now, truth to tell; I cannot map the days and nights I passed, ensconced in the exoskeleton that Mundus created to hold me. It was not merely containment he sought, but transcendence. I have gained a new empathy for women, brother, as it was little more than a corporeal corset, in a sense, the device that distorted and reformed my essence into a new shape, hailed only as Nelo Angelo.

Mundus did not wish for me to come unwillingly. His ego demanded me whole and traitorous. He caged me in a room, o my brother, that was a flawless replica of my own as I knew it in mother’s house, each lavish detail present and accounted for. He practiced persuasion, at first; even going so far as to make that woman out of ashes and oblivion, as if all I wanted for was the substance of an ersatz mother.

It was a miscalculation on his part, brother, but not so ill-conceived as you might think. Given the state I was in, I might very well have broken and surrendered myself to his mercy, had he but offered me the one thing I longed for in my anguish. 

And that is the ultimate irony, isn’t it? That he might have had me after all, had he but chosen the right relative.

_You have suffered loss, Vergil, he told me. You bleed from uncounted wounds. You bleed unseen. But I see all._

Even in my battered condition, it bitterly amused me to hear a god so obviously pleased with himself. Head down, I knelt on the flagstone and gritted my teeth against his voice, which came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

_How you suffer, Vergil. How you bleed. Estranged from a love that began in utero._

His words hurt me physically, like a bolt from the blue, blunt with unspoken truth, plucked from my innermost sanctum of self. Green sickness welled in my stomach, brother, upon being forced to consume them, for those thoughts were not yet ripe.

_You cry out for the womb, as all men do. But you have lost more than that. You have lost the tie that binds. The cord that has been irretrievably cut; severed and sundered by fate._

I knew better, didn’t I.

“Not fate,” I rasped to the cold floor. “Pride.”

I remember the chill of fear that came over me, then, that his words would compel me to acknowledge what would surely be my devastation. It was fortunate that Mundus did not hear my mindless whispers, absorbed as he was in fellating himself.

_To merely mend such a bond would be unworthy of my powers, Vergil. It would still bear the marks of imperfection. I will forge you a new one from wholecloth, unflawed and pristine._

Mundus may well have been a god, o my brother, and capable of making mothers from celestial scratch, but he was obviously not immune to the dangers of logical fallacy. Context is everything, as I so often told you, and Occam’s Razor is not always as sharp as it looks.

Perhaps I should rephrase that as if you could truly hear me, Dante.

Though I did not know it at the time, Mundus had backed the wrong horse.

_I see the fount of your suffering. I have done. It is Good. I see all._

There was a shaking of the very air, of the stone beneath my feet. I pushed myself up, Yamato in hand. And lo, there was a demon: resplendent in our mother’s body, and little else.

_Vergil, I give you your mother._

You’d remember her, Dante, though at the time she had no name, as she had only just stepped out of nether-ether. When she came to you, she had a name and a swagger quite unlike Eva. But Mundus always played to his house, o my brother.

There she stood. And she smiled, this creature; a beatific beaming.

“Vergil,” she whispered, in a voice of tremulous longing.

_Behold your mother restored._

I frowned.

“I think you mean my mother be-whored,” I said. I felt my arrogance returning to serve me once more, as I realized Mundus had misfired badly.

The demon looked confused, her smile slowly fading.

_Behold, and marvel, for she is your mother in every aspect._

“Indeed, I’m seeing aspects of my mother I never cared to imagine,” I replied, eyeing her scant ensemble with undisguised scorn.

“Vergil, is something wrong?” she said, distressed. Her arms shot out, as if to hold me. I gave her a withering look and circled back toward the other side of the room.

_You are in withdrawal. Your soul shudders from the affliction. I see all._

“So you hired me a stripper? To take the edge off?” My laugh was bitter. “I think you’ve got the wrong son of Sparda.”

_She cries out to you, Vergil._

It was true. This demon was crying, her hands outstretched, tears burning from the corners of her eyes. I turned away.

_Embrace your mother, Vergil._

“That isn’t a mother,” I said, darkly. “It’s a weeping statue. You’ve performed a miracle. Now show me a card trick.”

The creature that favored our mother gave a ragged sob and threw herself toward me. My hand met her advance at once, and she crumpled at my feet, weeping most unattractively—not the false tears of artful pretense, but the unpretty and wracking sobs of real despair.

“Vergil,” she moaned, her fingers blindly seeking the hem of my coat. “Please don’t do this. Please, let me—”

“No.”

I rejected her outright, although she begged me to at least pretend, for her sake, for mine. At the time I assumed that she feared being sent back to oblivion. She needn’t have worried. As it was, he found another use for her, did he not.

Sometimes I cannot help but wonder, Dante, if she ever told you any of this. In passing, or in earnest, at some relevant or unguarded moment. If she did, I am almost certain she did not tell you all that transpired, and if by some small chance she did, I hope you understand the context under which I acted. In my cold rage, I knew no reason beyond defiance.

So she wept, there on the ground, stones biting into her knees. She wept, and I let her.

Mundus seemed to have fallen silent for the time, perhaps to see if I would warm to the sound of her suffering, like a dutiful son. Indeed, it was the only sound for several moments, and I felt no more endeared.

“Now then,” I said.

I took hold of her hair, which was long and golden and straight as a stick, the very mirror of our mother’s. I clearly remembered Eva, cheerfully lamenting how she could never convince it to curl, no matter what torture or tincture she employed in the task. This demon made of silica and sulfur-dust was not Eva, but she was afflicted with the same fashion limitations. I wondered how deep the deception ran. Would she have our mother’s ridiculous fear of spiders? Would she know the same songs?

She looked up at me, bewildered but unflinching. Her eyes were red and swollen. In them lay fierce adoration, a determined seed, no doubt planted by Mundus.

“What about you?” I uttered on the edges of my breath. “How thorough was he in his work?”

Her lips parted.

“What do you mean?”

“Were you created with the inherent need to love me?” I demanded in a whisper. “A wanting for a son?”

“I love you,” she said, helplessly. “I love you, Vergil. It’s my only thought.”

“I see,” I said, coldly. 

_Vergil._ Mundus was back, his tone more insistent. _A mother needs the love of her son._

I narrowed my eyes.

This was not my mother, not yours, this demon who came out of oblivion just this hour. I would come to know her as Tricia, but at that moment she was an unformed pawn, tossed into my gilded cage like emotional chum. I felt nothing for his organic piecework.

I heard my own voice, brother, harsh and sibilant.

“Very well. Embrace me, if you must. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Vergil,” she said softly. “Yes.”

“Or…must I embrace you? Is that what you require?” The look on Tricia’s face was blissful as any chapel madonna’s, but I felt no compassion for anything in that moment, only a vast and arctic hatred for Mundus, and his twisted parlor tricks. “Or perhaps you’d prefer a nice kiss.”

She nodded in rapture, raising her face to mine, expectant and naïve, and I seized her with vicious precision, pressing my mouth roughly against hers. A moan escaped her, and I felt the sting of the wintry smile that touched my lips. My cynical suspicion was confirmed; Mundus’ creation knew nothing of what constituted maternal affection.

“My touch? Is that what you want?” 

“Yes,” she gasped. Her cheeks were flushed, her hands clutching me instinctively, for though she was not my mother, or yours, or anyone else’s, Mundus had made her a woman. 

My hands roamed her brutally, my motions coldly efficacious, calculated to evoke arousal. She arched into my hands, breathing heavily. Expertise did not fail me, o my brother, even if compassion did.

I tilted my head. “Do you like that, _mother_? Does that suffice?”

The demon was making inarticulate noises of what I presumed to be innocent delight. My smile was bitter as I spun her bodily around, so that her palms braced against the stone of the wall. She was utterly tractable, falling into position without question, her body imbued with ancient physical knowledge beyond her brief existence.

“Please,” she crooned. “Please.”

“Hear that, Mundus?” I muttered. “Of course you do.”

She wore tight black leather; I jerked it down to her thighs, freeing myself and entering her without preamble, shoving my cock deep and angling up as I began to thrust. I was hard, yes, but not for any great want of the act. The act was nothing but a means to vindication, o my brother.

The demon was moaning, her body taut and responsive, pushing back against me wantonly as any whore, blissfully oblivious to the impropriety of our actions. I looked up, turning my gaze toward the triumvirate of eyes that hovered in the sky, knowing they were always there, though I could not see them through the ornate ceilings; knowing that Mundus knew no such limitations.

“Is this your idea of _amor matris_?” I demanded loudly. “I think you did not excel at Latin, despite your name.”

Perhaps Mundus was too enraged to reply, or perhaps he was taken aback by my audacity. I cared nothing in the moment. I knew he was watching, and that was enough to drive my resolve. This demon—this woman—was pleading, breathless and inaudible strings of syllables, her long fingers grasping the wall. She was begging in the broadest sense, the universal cry of an infant who knows not even what it needs. Desperate for what she was missing, no doubt, what this position, though compelling, did not afford.

“You don’t know, do you?” I muttered. “Of course not.” 

Wordlessly I took her hand from the wall and placed it on her sex, holding it under my own as I pressed down in slow circles. She was slick with arousal. I could feel the marble intrusion of my own cock, relentlessly pushing into her from beneath. Her thighs heaved outward at the touch, and she seemed to grasp the idea at once. I drew my hand away, as she began stroking herself with an enthusiasm that quite surpassed mine. I wanted her to climax, o my brother, for nothing would speak louder than her pleasured convulsions at the end of my cock. Nothing else could possibly serve better to show Mundus how badly he had failed in his endeavor.

As her urgency grew, I increased my force. Now I was truly battering her, my hand braced against the wall beside her, my eyes fixed in concentration. I knew I would not be able to come, Dante. Not like this, not here. Even considering the twisted cachet of fucking one’s own mother in proxy, I was unmoved. Resentment and spite kept my cock stiff and willing, but they would not give me release.

It wouldn’t have mattered to me, had it not been for the fact that circumstances demanded it. I knew all too well that Mundus would interpret any hesitation on my part as reluctance, as evidence that I, on some level, must be unsettled by this creature’s resemblance to Eva, and I couldn’t have that.

In the end, I turned to the only thing I knew of that had never failed to bring me to my knees. I thought of you, brother.

Culmination was swift and merciless.

The demon beneath me screamed as she brought herself to orgasm, throwing her head back so that her long hair spilled over my flexing arms, and she tightened in her bliss, gripping me with intermittent ferocity, like the deadly pulse of electric current.

It was not bad, only lacking. 

Lacking somehow, in something vital, but nevertheless I found myself at the peak seconds after, having coincided by chance and not design. It was a strange and brutal climax, brother, ripped from me in a sharp and cauterizing surge that was pleasurable but ultimately insignificant. It receded like tide, going out swiftly, and far more lamb-like than the transient bombast that announced it.

The creature was stunned and sweet, purring to herself; feeling, no doubt, that she had fulfilled all that she had been created for. Innocent, unknowing. Perhaps she thought like Eva, perhaps she even felt like Eva. Who knew what mannerisms had been plucked from my mind; which were pure extrapolation, which were colored by my interpretation, and which were veritable?  
Perhaps she even screamed like Eva at the moment of sexual truth. I cannot say, and I had no real wish to contemplate. In any case, with everything of Eva’s that she had been given, there was nothing of Eva about her.

I withdrew from her without ceremony, and pulled myself together once more, running a hand back over my hair. I looked up slowly, seeking Mundus in the frescoed expanse of the ceiling.

“Next time you go minting mothers, you may want to fix that little kink.”

The demoness had turned around, and was leaning against the wall, clutching it with a flat palm. She watched me with eyes wide and dazed, looking as if she wanted a cigarette badly, but of course she knew nothing of cigarettes. All the better for me, as I find the habit repulsive.

Mundus chuckled, and it was the first mirth I’d ever heard from that stone idol. 

_You have a vivid way of illustrating your convictions, Son of Sparda._

I was mildly surprised by his good humor, which seemed, at the very least, unusual, and at the worst, ill-omened. 

“You have a funny concept of maternal instinct.”

_She was created to nurture you._

“That was more nature than nurture.”

_You impress me, hybrid, despite your intentions. You are colder than I anticipated. This bodes well for your future._

My eyes narrowed.

_Though it may have been rash to spill your seed inside her, Vergil._

My smile was pure contempt. For a moment I wished for nothing more than to have you there, brother, so that we might share the hilarity of those asinine words that dripped straight from the maw of a god. Of course, in the adjacent moment it occurred to me that discerning subtle irony had never been your forte.

“I’m not unduly worried over it.”

_If she should conceive, your son will be mine._

I shook my head, as if he were a disappointing child. “You called me a hybrid yourself, Mundus. Do I need to spell it out for you? My brother and I are essentially mules.”

_You are sterile_

“Jackpot,” I drawled.

_No matter. I am eager to press you into service, Vergil. Perhaps more eager now than before._

“Non serviam.”

_…You favor Latin, it seems._

Something about his words filled me with unease. They seemed portentous, ominous and not unfamiliar, as if I’d forgotten something very significant about the future, as laid out to me in fever dreams.

_No more mothers, Vergil. I have a far better thought in mind._

The woman-demon struggled into the resulting pause, her knees still weak, her smile astronomically, hectically bright.

“Don’t mind him,” she murmured, touching my face. “It will be all right.”

I drew back as if burned, shooting her a look.

_You may choose to reject her acquaintance, Vergil. But I will keep her on. There is a use for her._

“She is not my mother. I have no affinity.”

_Even if she is not your mother, she will suffer as if she were._

“Let her angst.” I regarded her through arctic eyes. “I want no part of it.” 

I lied, for I realized even then that I held no particular ill will toward Tricia, who was the unfortunate and clueless culmination of Mundus’ alchemy in flesh. She seemed as much a prisoner as I, called into being for only one purpose, and once deprived of it, left to exist aimlessly and without boundary.

Neither did it escape my attention, brother, that her innate devotion would likely serve me well. It was reasonable to assume that should an opportune moment arise, her loyalties would ultimately lie with me, overriding those of Mundus.

_It will not be long in coming, Son of Sparda. Your reckoning. Prepare yourself. I leave you, to return._

“He’s gone,” she said, hesitantly, and she was right. Mundus was absent, at least; his heavy presence no longer hovered above us, silent and crushing. I was not at all certain he could ever be gone in a world where he was nearly ubiquitous.

I turned to her. 

“Listen to me. I have no ill will toward you, but you must understand that what you feel is not organic.”

She nodded slowly, waiting for more.

“I am not your son,” I continued, and rubbed my temples, feeling the siren call of an impending headache. I sighed. “In any case, what I did to you—”

“I liked it,” she said.

“Yes,” I muttered. “I know that.”

“You didn’t like it?” She looked genuinely curious.

“It was fine,” I told her. “But that will not happen again, not between us.”

She seemed to be thinking. Her glance settled boldly on my loins.

“What was it?” she asked. “When you…” 

“Sex,” I told her. “Which was not part of Mundus’ plan.”

“Mundus doesn’t like sex?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“That I really couldn’t say,” I replied obscurely.

“You like sex.”

“…Yes.”

“But not with me.”

I was silent. 

“There’s someone else,” she said, with a moment of uncanny insight, and I wondered, brother, for half a moment, if she actually had inherited some form of maternal intuition. 

I frowned, though she could not see it, brother, angled as she was.

“Mundus made a miscalculation. We’re both lucky in that regard.”

She studied my profile. I could feel her eyes growing ever more sentient. 

“Very well, Vergil. I understand.”

I know that her instincts never truly changed. The nurturing impulse was still there, unnamed and urgent, and sometimes it would not be denied.

In the uneasy few days before Mundus enacted his final vengeance, I would spend my nights in the flawless prison he had recreated, forcing my mind to detach from the direness of my predicament—and from thoughts of you, o my brother, brash and carefree out in the world of mortals.

On one such blue evening, I was reading a book I had found in one of the neglected libraries, refreshing my slipped grasp of provincial demonic script, when I heard her come into the room.

“I know I’m not your mother,” she began, and I saw that her hands trembled.

There was something she knew, or suspected. I was not surprised that something was imminent. Something is always imminent, o my brother, I suppose, and I had certainly invited Mundus’ wrath in a hundred ways, not least of which by merely being who I was.

“Please, Vergil,” she said. “Can I hold you?”

I said nothing, but I let her sit down on my bed, and pull my head into her lap. She calmed at once, as her fingers touched my brow.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t help it.”

There was silence as she stroked my hair.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “We are what we are.”


	2. Chapter 2

Mundus relented in the end—and by that I do not mean he showed me mercy, brother—but rather that he decided to take a shortcut to my compliance. It was far less of a coup to bend my will through the use of his powers, but he was eventually forced to abandon any hope of securing my willing allegiance. My youthful arrogance served me well; I won out over him.

And I lost, spectacularly.

He broke me into pieces, like the stars, and remade me in a shell.

_You are no longer a Son of Sparda. You are my son now, and I will name you._

_Neloangelo._

_Speak, and know yourself._

I remember nothing after that moment.

Or nearly nothing. There is one memory, Dante, that does not elude my recollection. Perhaps it would be better if it did. In the days since my renaissance, I’ve often thought that if I could, I would lose it forever in the nether-reaches of my more Siberian psyche, simply abandon it on the icy steppes. If I could forget, brother, I could justifiably disbelieve my past, and blithely dismiss my tenure as Mundus’ black angel. But I am never blithe, Dante, as we both know full well. As you always delighted in reminding me.

So I keep it in mind.

It is a single moment, a mere vignette in twenty lost years, but it is all that remains to me of Nelo Angelo. When I served Mundus, Tricia served him as well; I to his left and she to his right. The temple of his devotion was white, and he towered over all. His expression was fixed, his eyes gazed forward, for he had no need to turn his head.

_Neloangelo._

“Vergil,” Tricia whispered. “Mundus is summoning you.”

She persisted in calling me this name that did not describe me, and though I did respond to it, I did not recognize it; neither did I ask her why she persevered. I said nothing, for in those days I rarely spoke.

Mundus sat motionless upon his throne, doing an unconvincing impression of a harmless statue. His arm was outstretched; his upright hand was vast and white. In his palm was a mirror. In the mirror was a man.

I did not know him. 

“Look Vergil,” intoned Tricia. “Look hard.”

His coat was red, his eyes were cold. He was standing in a courtyard, over the disintegrating body of a shadowy beast, his piercing gaze upcast and fixed upon the sky. The grass was crushed and wet with blood. For some reason my attention was drawn to the neglected fountain.

“You don’t know him?” she whispered, once more. “Not at all?”

I shook my head, and there was a silence.

_Nelo Angelo, behold your adversary._

The image shifted, and now this same man was standing in a bedroom, a room that I remembered. He was looking around, as if something had captured his attention strangely. He caught sight of the mirror and stared into the glass, and now I could see his face at greater vantage.

I cocked my head to better regard him.

“Mundus will want you to kill him,” Tricia said, taking my arm. Her hand I could not feel. She leaned close. She put her mouth against my ear—and then she told me his name. 

A name that meant nothing.

And yet her voice had been so strange. So urgent. I frowned, for I knew her tone had meaning beyond what was said. I was underwater and grasping for words that were spoken on shore. I looked again at the man Mundus had put before me. He was still gazing into the glass, as if scrying for insight in its depths.

“He is vain,” I said.

Tricia looked up, suddenly, at the sound of my voice. A rarified thing.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he is.”

“I like his looks,” I said, and when she turned to me once more, I had taken them on.

She stared, and did not speak again.

“...He will appreciate this,” I said. “Even if he must die.”

I remember stepping through the mirror, the glass parting like water, ripples across Mundus’ vast palm. It is all I remember. You would know the story from there, o my brother, far better than I.

If my history as the Black Angel is so much shattered china, then that is the largest piece. Other little shards and fragments exist, and periodically they dig their way free of my mind, like emerging shrapnel—but by itself each is inconsequential. Even taken together they do not amount to much. The corrupted psyche, irretrievable. The vase that is in too many pieces to glue. But I remember you.

Yes, Dante, I can remember. And sometimes, I do.

Not everything, not all things—but sometimes when I am standing alone in a desolate place, I will let myself look over the pieces of our history, disjointed and disparate, and try to reconcile a truth from the ruin.

“He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past”, is what Thoreau once wrote. I often mouth those words, even now, as if I might persuade myself toward such restraint. A compelling turn of phrase, and sound advice in any case. Particularly sound advice for a disenfranchised devil prince. 

Thoreau must not be blamed that my thoughts turn always back to you.

Dante, the son of my mother and father. The firebrand, the upstart. Joker to my jack. Day to my night, sunlight to my shadow. How is it that you exist, there, without me, or I here, without you? It seems to defy all the laws of our world, which admittedly was not the mortal world, or the demon world, but some ambiguous between. The reassuring weight of Mother’s amulet upon my chest was once enough to evoke your presence, regardless of how far apart we strayed, or estranged. Now I feel the phantom ache of your absence, o my brother, in the empty space around my neck.

Among other places.

My mind mirrors the landscape of the netherworld, a juxtaposition of exquisite vistas and savage terrain. When I open the gate, I see devastation and perfection, side by side in uncanny symbiosis. I seek your footsteps in the pristine snow. I search for you among the rubble.

Yet oddly enough, it is not our last meeting that I find intact; that is at best a shadow play that I can make little of, maddeningly dim around the edges, faded and overexposed in the most crucial moments.

Beneath the charred and buckling planks of what once was the ediface of Nelo Angelo, there is untouched winter. Cold storage for memories. Here I find my arctic refuge as I left it, locked down tight, preserving all in a kiss-soft blanket of frost. The theater of our history stands silent and solemn in the midst of it all, a temple to dysfunctional passion. 

And if I press on, if I turn further into the wings of my mind’s proscenium and step beneath the arch, then here, at last, I can behold a spotlight upon the house that we grew up in. It is that time that comes so vividly to me now, as I bide my time in purgatory. 

But not just any time, Dante. 

The first time.


	3. Chapter 3

It was deep October, in the autumn of our eighteenth year, when Father’s dear, dark blood kicked in and stopped the clock. We have no real chronology past that, o my brother, as you well know. The years ceased to leave any watermark, and our days became immeasurable.

Now we are as fixed and constant as the stars.

But once, we were still unfixed; mutable as water, physically malleable. Growing, my brother, like thistles in a tulip field. 

Either way, it was all the same to Mother.

Mother had a softness about her, didn’t she? She smelled of Chanel no. 5, and her eyes were the darkest, most mundane brown—the kind that trumps every round of genetic roulette—unless, of course, you are up against Daddy’s goods.

But what I remember most is that softness, and how I always indulged it, even though I have not, to this day, understood it. You might have understood it better, my brother. I suspect it lives in you too, despite your vigor. Perhaps that is why I never could deny you, as much as my nature might have wished to do so.

Eva. Wife of a displaced devil. Mother of the star-crossed twins. I find it almost quaint, now.

She came upon me, once, in the library of our great house, as I sat reading; poring over a book of unnatural history, for I was already suspicious of our origin. It had not really occurred to you, I know, that there was anything unusual about us, not in a concrete way, at least. In defense of your idiot oblivion, we had been sheltered from greater humanity in the classic sense of the comfortably wealthy—private tutors, maids, a houseman—but the servants were odd and unobtrusive, and the tutors were most certainly from out of town, if you get my drift.

While we had been raised in complete awareness of otherworldly things, Father’s affinity had never been completely explained to us. When we were younger, my assumption had always been that it was no different than any other job. If one’s father were a zookeeper, he would spend time among tigers. It wouldn’t occur to you to ask if he was a tiger himself.

But I began to wonder, brother, around the time I learned the Twelve Fallacies of Logic from a talking octopus, whether my analogy had in fact been entirely misapplied. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was less an occupation, and more an affiliation. Perhaps, Dante, it was less like the zoo, and more like the mafia.

One might reasonably assume that a man who works with tigers is not a tiger, but it’s difficult to make the same statement about a man who works with organized criminals; especially if he shares many of the attributes and abilities of his associates. Further proof, Dante, that in my original assumption, I had committed the lamentable sin of False Analogy. Even if a man who tends tigers eats raw meat and licks his own ass, you wouldn’t call him a tiger. You’d call the whitecoats.

There were things about you and I that supported the notion that Mother had committed some sins as well; namely the sin of omission. These things were many and legion, and _inhuman_ by definition. 

Naturally, you took them all at face value. But I had been thinking, and my thinking blooms outward like a clambering rose, twining and encompassing. Seeking chinks in which to insinuate sly tendrils; seeking to pull down walls. 

The most elementary survey of anthropology confirmed it: human physiology simply did not allow for us, Dante. 

“I brought you some coffee.” Eva’s hand was light upon my shoulder. “I thought you could use some. It’s getting so cold outside.”

“Thank you,” I said, absently, as she set a tray on the end table. It held a French press and two cups, a pitcher of cream and a bowl of raw sugar. “…Mother,” I added, belatedly, looking up from my reading. 

She was wearing a red dress, and her hair was piled carelessly atop her head like dark, tarnished gold, upswept and pinned with decorative combs. My gaze traveled to her hands as she poured the coffee.

“Two cups?” I said, pleasantly.

She smiled. “Mind if I join you?”

“If you like.”

“Vergil…” she began, hesitantly. 

“Something on your mind, Eva?” I asked, before I could remind myself to call her Mother. I was very deliberate about invoking the title, as a general rule, for it didn’t come naturally to me. I grimaced at my misstep.

If she noticed, she said nothing. She tapped her nails against the sides of her coffee cup and bit her lip, preoccupied. Finally she glanced up, tilting her head.

“Have you noticed something off about Dante?”

I raised an eyebrow and felt it was eloquent enough as a reply.

Our mother smiled.

“Vergil,” she admonished. “I mean lately. He’s been acting strangely this whole week.”

I said nothing. I sipped my coffee, giving her a noncommittal look. She pushed the cream toward me.

“I can’t help but think that something is bothering him. I’ve had to say his name three times to get his attention. He stares off into space.”

“Maybe he has undiagnosed minor epilepsy,” I suggested dryly. “Petit mal seizures can be almost indistinguishable from actual introspective thought.”

Eva rolled her eyes, ever-tolerant.

“Dante is not epileptic. He’s distracted. Don’t think that I don’t know what brooding looks like on that face,” she added, touching my nose, with impunity only a mother would dare to invoke.

I smirked briefly, stirring my coffee with a ludicrously small spoon that earned my instantaneous disdain. “And yet you never worry about me.”

“It isn’t like him, Vergil.”

“What isn’t like him? Thinking? Listen to yourself. Ever hear of a self-fulfilling prophecy, Mother?”

Eva studied me for a moment, finally sighing, and setting down her cup with an indulgent smile. “I’m sorry, Vergil. I suppose you wouldn’t really notice. After all, you hardly acknowledge him.”

There was wistful remorse in her tone, and something else that sounded almost like guilt, o my brother, if my ears did not deceive me.

My eyes narrowed. “Dante is a mouth-breather. I hardly think it deserves much analysis. Unless there’s something else I’ve failed to notice. Which seems unlikely. I’m nothing if not observant.”

Our mother hesitated, toying with the chain around her neck, and I saw the depths of her concern for you, like a lambent haze from the corner of my eye. “He’s never this quiet.”

“You should be grateful.”

“It’s been more than a week.”

“Almost a week,” I remonstrated, in absent annoyance, because it was just like Eva to exaggerate the facts to make a point, and I was in no mood for motherly hyperbole. When I looked up again, she was staring at me.

“..What?” I demanded.

“You did notice.”

I said nothing, but took another sip of coffee, eyeing her with forced insouciance.

She leaned forward. “Then you know that he’s been watching you, Vergil.”

I wasn’t surprised that she’d caught on. Your eyes had been inescapable these past seven days. You were not exactly subtle, Dante, in your scrutiny.

There was a significant pause, where Eva searched my face for signs with little success. “…Was it a fight?” 

“Do you know, there _was_ a fight, Mother,” I told her. My voice was arid. “It’s been going on since the day we were born.”

“No, it’s more than that.” She shook her head, resolute. “You must know something, Vergil. I’ve never seen him act like this.”

I looked at her for some time. When I finally spoke, my voice had cooled by several degrees. “Believe me when I tell you, I’ve no insight as to what he’s thinking.”

It was true, brother, or at least the letter of it was. I suspected I knew the genesis of your thoughts, but not what direction they had taken. The stare you’d been leveling in my direction was enigmatic and intense, yes, but hardly telling. Your eyes were unreadable, almost distant. They held no overt hostility, but all the same, the constant assessment was unsettling.

Eva poured me a second cup without asking, and I obligingly doctored it to my taste. “You could talk to him, Vergil.”

“Why would I do that?” 

“He needs you.”

“Dante needs nothing.” I took up my book once more. 

Eva’s voice was quiet. “You’re wrong, Vergil. His whole life, he’s been chasing your shadow, as you slip away from him.”

I frowned, looking at her skeptically. “That’s a little dramatic, isn’t it?”

She was staring at me. 

“You’re so much like your father,” she whispered. Her hand covered mine, tentatively, as if she was unsure I would welcome it. Although her intentions were no doubt sincere, I took umbrage at the hesitance that informed the gesture, the unspoken implication that I might become hostile at a touch.

“And Dante?” I demanded, narrowing my eyes. 

“Dante is more like me,” she said. 

“He is nothing like you.”

“Don’t you see it? He loves you so much. Yet you allow him so little.”

I was silent, my lips pressed together. The tick of the mantel clock above my head was somehow both monotonous and unsynchronized, but undeniably present.

“Please, Vergil. Please. Find out what’s wrong. Go to him.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” I told her, beneath my breath.

I moved to run my hand back over my brow, and she abruptly withdrew her fingers from where they rested atop my own, knocking over the French press in her haste. It hit the bone colored marble with a rather unsatisfying sound, scattering thin glass in all directions. The steel-ribbed exoskeleton of the frame lay awkwardly in a streak of black coffee, looking like a primordial fossil rising out of a tar pit.

“Oh, shit.” She got up immediately, and began to pick up the shattered glass with bare fingers.

“Leave it,” I told her, bemused. “The maid will get it.”

She sighed, standing up. “That’s most of it, anyway.”

I shook my head, eyeing the stacked glass in her palm. “Honestly, I don’t know why you even keep the help around, if you insist on cleaning up every mishap yourself.” 

Eva shrugged. “It was nothing,” she said brightly, but I had not forgotten that she had reacted when I’d moved, jerking her hand away as if a cobra had suddenly danced out of the cream pitcher. “Really darling, just hand me that napkin.”

My eyes narrowed. “Mother. You’re bleeding.”

“Oh!” 

She looked down, at the trickle of scarlet that painted the cup of her palm, smearing onto the shards in a translucent glaze. “You’re right. I cut myself,” she said, dismayed. “Right across the middle.”

She dropped the handful of glass gingerly onto the silver tea-service. I deftly covered it with a fine white napkin. “You’d better sit down,” I told her, raising an eyebrow. I handed her another napkin, and she wrapped it around the wound, smiling.

“Thank you. It isn’t as bad as it looks.”

“No? That’s good. After all, you need to be careful, don’t you?” I leaned slowly back in my chair, watching her as she dutifully applied pressure, her initial shock having subsided. Small red roses bloomed through the white linen, astoundingly clarion.

I felt my lips tighten. 

“...I should get you a bandage, shouldn’t I? Maybe some disinfectant. That would be the proper thing for a dutiful son, and I am ever your dutiful son. But the thing is, Mother—” I paused, tilting my head significantly. “I’ve never seen any. I wouldn’t even know where to look for such a thing.”

Eva glanced up, and I knew I’d struck a chord.

“I’m fine,” she said, with a smile that was overbright, too immediate. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart. I’ve got mother’s hands.”

I smiled coolly, picking up a piece of broken glass from the tray in front of me and rolling it nonchalantly between my fingertips. “Really. In that case, I suppose I must have Father’s hands.”

Eva smiled absently, looking up from her hand. “How so?”

I sighed. “You force me to demonstrate, just as Dante does. Every time. To force you into admitting what you already know to be true. Clearly you are every bit his mother. Watch now.”

I kept my gaze locked to hers as I held up the jagged glass for illustration, along with my unblemished palm. Without hesitation I drew the edge along my flesh, causing Eva to cry out. She realized quickly enough that there was no cause for alarm, despite her first instincts. Her mouth closed and she looked at me uneasily.

I inspected my work. The cut was far worse than hers.

“You know, this would almost certainly require stitches,” I remarked, mildly. “But it won’t, will it?”

She hardly needed to reply; she could see and I could see that it was already healing, drawing inward on itself until little remained but a thin and nonspecific line. A few more seconds and there was nothing at all. I ran my index finger across it, as if checking for dust.

“Good as new. I find that odd, Mother.”

Eva was looking at the table. She unwound the linen from her hand and set it aside. “Don’t ever do that again,” she said, in a low voice. “It’s hard enough watching you tear each other apart.”

“I wouldn’t have done it at all, but you persisted in humoring me.”

I could hear the ice that coated my tone. I returned to my book, opening it absently to the page that I had marked with an untidy dog-ear, a solitary quirk of mine that would almost seem more suited to you, brother, if indeed you actually read anything so cerebral as books.

Eva was quiet for a minute or so. “I don’t know what to tell you, Vergil,” she said, at last. “You would think that by now I would have figured it out.”

“What is there to know?” I replied succinctly, turning a page and following it down with eyes that had long ceased to read and comprehend. “Tell the truth. Tell me why it is that Dante and I defy every natural law, while you, our mother, require bactine and time like everyone else.”

She shook her head, her dark eyes shining like mica. I found them almost pretty, in that moment, though they were nothing like mine. Or yours.

“You already know, Vergil. You’ve realized. You’re not like everyone else.”

I paused, and closed the book with a sharp, soft clap.

“Yes,” I punctuated. “I had entertained that thought, Mother.” I set the weighty edition down on the sideboard, careful not to disrupt the equilibrium of the elaborate Chinese vase that stood sentinel there. A gift, she had told us, from our father, who had fought in the East. Which revealed exactly nothing. “Call it intuition,” I added, coolly.

“ _Aberrants, Deviations and Anomalies_ ,” she read, gazing at the cover of the book I had discarded. “What on earth are you doing with that?”

“I had thought I might find a taxonomy in which to fit myself and my brother,” I told her blithely. “Or better yet, diagrams of an adpressed dissection.”

She shuddered, and managed a feeble smile. “I should hope not.”

“I expect you’d prefer it,” I remarked. “It would save me the trouble of carving up Dante in the name of science.”

She couldn’t help but betray a glimpse of an actual smile at that, and I leaned back in my chair, chin tipped upward, regarding her. “…Well, Mother? I’m waiting.” 

Poor Eva. I don’t envy her position, with the benefit of all that I know now. I should have let her come out with it, in her own time, her own way. But I was young and I wanted everything.

“What can I tell you?”

“The truth. Unvarnished and plain.”

“Your father was a demon.”

I frowned. “I don’t suppose you’re being metaphorical.”

“No.”

Had I not been so implacable, o my brother, I might have choked. But I have my nature, as you have yours.

“At last we’re getting somewhere.”

I was surprised again when Eva reached out, brushing a jagged slip of hair back from my face. She shook her head fondly, and I felt like turning away from the obvious affection in her eyes. “Nothing fazes you, does it, Vergil? Sometimes I swear you have liquid nitrogen in your veins.”

“I think you’ll have to take responsibility for any deviations from the biological norm, _Rosemary_ ,” I retorted absently.

In truth I was utterly stunned. Not by the revelation, but by the ease with which it came to light. I don’t know what I expected—more reticence, perhaps, as she’d always been so enigmatic about the subject—or perhaps I merely anticipated the prospect of more coercion on my end. In any case, I had not prepared for this. 

Eva waited in silence for a moment, then looked carefully at her hands, which lay in her lap. “Have you nothing more to say, Vergil?”

"Well done, Mother. I’m impressed.”

“Now you know what your father was. You always knew what I am.”

My eyes narrowed. “And where exactly does that leave me and my idiot twin?”

Eva looked up, and her gaze met mine. 

“Alone, together.”

I felt an odd chill course through me at those words, uttered so artlessly. It was nothing less than an epiphany, o my brother, to absorb the universal truth contained in those spare syllables.

“Forgive me,” I murmured, abstracted and preoccupied, glancing to the side with eyes that saw nothing, inward-turned as they were. “It never struck me.”

Perhaps not, but it struck me now, Dante, to my basest primal core, and even as she said it, I realized I should have been aware, should have known by instinct what I now drew from inference. How in all existence, my brother, there were no others forged as I was. None but you.

I steepled my fingers and rested my chin upon them, consumed by unanswerable questions. What did it mean to be a confirmed half-devil? Some things we knew by trial and error, such as the fact that we merrily recovered from mortal wounds. Others, I recognized purely by common sense; using Mother as a litmus, it was clearly unnatural to be able to move as fast, or jump as high as we could, brother.

Was that all? Or were there unseen inheritances yet to emerge?

“Father never talked to me about this part of adolescence,” I muttered. “I feel as if this should have been covered.”

“He couldn’t know any more than you or I,” Eva said. “There’s no precedent for this kind of thing. At least you know what you are, now. That’s something, isn’t it, Vergil?”

“We know what we are, but not what we’ll become.” Scratch that, Dante. You knew nothing, and seemed to like it that way.

Mother paused then, and somehow that odd look was back on her face, the one that looked suspiciously like an inextricable morass of guilt and regret.

“There’s something else you should know.”

“What is it now?” I sighed. “Let me guess. When you met Sparda you were working the pole at Love Planet to ‘put yourself through college’?”

“Vergil…” she began.

“Really. I’m listening.”

“What you said earlier, about you and Dante being at odds since birth…”

“Our bitter rivalry?” I said, pleasantly, looking up.

She looked pained, but regardless, she pressed on. “It isn’t true, Vergil.”

My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

Our mother took a very deep breath. “From the moment you were born, there was never anyone else in the world that could hold his attention. And it was the same for you.”

I’m sure I looked askance at that, but she was studiously avoiding my gaze.

“…Neither of you would sleep without touching some part of the other one. Dante would shriek like nothing I’ve ever heard if I picked you up and took you somewhere that he couldn’t see you. You never were much for crying, but you would frown at me. When I put you back down, you would just look at him solemnly and he would be content again, babbling like he hadn’t seen you in twenty years.”

I was silent, regarding her, so she nodded and continued.

“You were incredibly close. Too close, I thought, but your father told me that such a bond was not only natural, but desirable in the demon world. He called it an organic safeguard.” She looked to the side, remembering. “He told me I was looking at it from a humanocentric perspective. ‘Think it over, and you’ll see,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t want such powers at odds.’ Sparda was unconcerned about anything but preparing you both for your legacy. He felt it was the only atonement he could make for leaving such a heavy burden in the first place.”

Eva looked down for a moment. “…It gets harder from here.”

“Go on, Mother. I insist.” 

I could hear the tautness of my body reflected in my voice. Eva pushed aside a coffee cup, as if her hands required something to do.

“As you grew, your attachment grew, and with it came a new kind of physical expression. At about five, you developed an affectionate little rivalry. Sparda was thrilled with you both—tiny and ferocious and utterly devoted to each other. But I…” She bit her lip. “God, I don’t want to say this.”

“Say it.”

“I was never convinced that it was normal for you and Dante to be so possessive of each other, so intense, so…utterly enmeshed, despite what your father said. It seemed unnatural to me, and some of the things he said…” She shook her head. “Some of what he told me might come to pass between you as the result of such a bond…it worried me, Vergil. It was so different from what would be accepted in the mortal world.”

I closed my eyes, almost afraid she would elaborate.

“…So when this competitive dynamic emerged between you, I encouraged it.”

I felt a sting of something, deep inside me.

“…Encouraged?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking.” She put her face in her hands, and I began to become alarmed.

“I’m sure it has nothing to do with that,” I told her, bloodlessly.

“Oh, but it does, Vergil. It does. I urged you toward hostility, and reinforced you for challenging each other. I fostered competition between you, and it only got worse with your father gone.”

She looked up, and her eyes glittered with the threat of rain.

I cannot rationalize my reaction, brother.

Tears have always disquieted me in ways I cannot define to a point or confine to a reason. Perhaps because tears are so rare to us. A devil’s tears take oceans of anguish to produce. Humans spill them like so much meaningless glitter. Still, I was aghast at the thought of Mother crying, to such an extent that it took precedence over what she had just told me.

“Don’t,” I told her abruptly. “It isn’t worth it.”

She looked at me, stunned.

“It was nothing Mother,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

“I need you to understand what I did, Vergil. If you understand, maybe you can salvage what was. You could talk to Dante, without this silly rivalry between you.”

Though she looked stricken and confused, she no longer looked like she was going to cry, and I felt a palpable sense of relief engulf me. I exhaled imperceptibly, and straightened my jacket cuffs with a minimal, effective gesture, favoring her with a smirk.

“Dr. Spock authored no books on raising hell-spawn, Mother,” I said, with a dismissive cant of my head. “As you said, there was no precedent.” 

Eva shook her head. 

“Only now do I realize how very right your father was.” Her voice was softly bitter. She stood up, and walked to the window. “I should have listened,” she said, without turning around. “Now it’s too late.”

“Truly, Mother, I don’t think it would affect the price of tea in China,” I said with cool dispassion, returning to the pages of my book.

I resumed my reading, although it had been rendered largely an exercise in futility, not to put too fine a point on it. Still, I knew not what else to do in that moment, and it seemed like enough.

Eva could have done any number of things at that point, but she did none of them. She lingered, straightening the flowers in the vast amphora by the chaise. 

“Eva,” I drawled, at last, unable to concentrate. “I can’t help but notice you’re still here.”

“Vergil,” she said softly. “Look at me.” She held my gaze, steadfast and unwavering, as she pulled a single long-stemmed flower from the variegated collective.

It was a lily of some kind, or perhaps a trumpet flower. I was unacquainted with its name. Flowers barely entered my mind as things to be realized, except as brilliant charms to ward off the austere chill of vaulted rooms. I hardly noticed them in the sprawling gardens where I trained, relentlessly, at combat.

She held it up before me, straight and pristine on its verdant stem.

“My life is little more than this, compared to yours. I’m going to die, Vergil.”

“Don’t be maudlin, Mother—” I moved to interject, but she pushed her fingers against my lips, firmly, stilling them. Surprised, I let her.

“That time will come, my son, and sooner than you think.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why are you saying this?”

“Because when I’m gone, there will only be you. You and Dante. And that will never change.”

“And what do you want from me?” Despite my unfeeling tone, my hand trembled beneath her own.

“Promise me, Vergil. You’ll protect him.”

I closed my eyes. 

“…Don’t push him away. Let him love you.”

“Are you finished?” I asked, my voice thick; honeyed grit.

“Will you promise?” She grasped my arm, and I saw that for all her softness, mother held a steely soul in reserve. She would have needed it, for Father was no shrinking violet.

I opened my eyes and fixed them upon her, knowing they were icy and resolute. “You never needed to ask.”

“I never doubted you, Vergil,” she whispered, kissing my brow. Her lips were humanly mild, semi-warm. They had always felt strange to me, as someone who welcomes extremes.

When she had gone, I took the abandoned flower and pressed it deep within the pages of the book I no longer had any desire to read. And then I sat alone once more in the vast library, surrounded on all sides by the damning weight of knowledge.

Mother only wanted me to accept your love.

Mother could not have known what she asked of me.

Mother could not have known of the nature within us that I already suspected. Mother knew nothing of devils, save that she wed one, and let him make her gravid with luminous infants, who came smooth and bright-eyed from the womb, and looked up at her in complete cognizance.

Mother could not have known of a kiss between brothers, beneath a thin red moon, not a week before.

I knew all this and more.


	4. Chapter 4

You and I have an unhealthy history by human standards. 

When we were seven, we played at croquet, and you tried to separate my head from my shoulders with the blunt side of a mallet after I deliberately struck your ball from the course. I was a mercenary competitor, and you had a wicked temper. You tried valiantly to assassinate me that day, but alas, I too could wield a mallet, and all thoughts of the game were quickly forgotten in favor of bludgeoning one another with impunity.

It was Father who tore us apart, laughing as he did so. It was nothing for him to do it; just a finger beneath our collars, and we were suspended neatly. You spat and wriggled in his clutch like an infant pirhana.

I remember glancing over at our mother. She waved, but she looked pale.

We discovered that we were unable to kill each other a long time ago. We did not find it odd and it quickly became a part of the scenery. 

When Father was gone, our grieving Mother dutifully respected his wishes and doled out his keepsakes—a sword for you, and a sword for me. After that, croquet was all but abandoned in favor of our new game, the one that we have never outgrown.

There was a pleasure in our fighting, o my brother, a very dark and unspeakable pleasure that I know you have never articulated to a living soul—or a damned one, for that matter. No, Dante, that is a perverse little secret held purely between us. Others may well guess by watching, but they cannot know the extent of the shudder-inducing bouts that left us weak and spent, locked in sweet, vicious conflict until I would either give quarter or take you out of the game—for I was always the superior swordsman, despite your tenacity.

Yes, we were always up for a fight. 

So it was business as usual on that memorable night, almost a week before poor Eva found me in the library. 

That crisp October evening found us squaring off in the neglected courtyard at the edge of the garden. You had found me, as you often did, honing Yamato in the empty carriage house, and dragged me outside to spar with you.

“Wanna test that edge, bro?” you asked nonchalantly, hovering in the doorway.

I looked up, and frowned. You raised your eyebrows questioningly, giving Rebellion a lazy swing so that the sword’s tip pointed at me. A playful smile crept onto your lips.

I glanced back down at Yamato, running my finger slowly along the blade. It slid into the flesh like water. “Why not,” I said, after a moment. 

I followed you outside, into the fading autumn twilight, eyeing the indolent sway of your shoulders. Everything about you smacked of bravado in those days.

“I think that sword could have used a few more passes, bro,” you declared, smirking. “You didn’t even draw blood when you cut yourself.”

“You’re an idiot,” I informed you, coolly.

That was the beauty of the katana, after all, brother. Any wounds it inflicted were so clean and instantaneous, they took several seconds to bleed. In the case of my hand, devil healing had already kicked in. Yamato was sharp as a slicing wire, make no mistake. But I felt no need to explain to you what I could accomplish with a demonstration.

Words were always wasted on you anyway.

Here the stones were barren beneath our feet, sparkling with a dry dusting of frost. Ivy had eschewed the courtyard walls in favor of the woods beyond, and vast cracks ran along the masonry, like rivers in miniature. 

For lack of a gardener’s love, the topiary was growing unchecked. I was amused to see that a preciously begging dog in the corner seemed to have developed three heads.

You came at me without preamble, your red coat flapping in the chill air like a war banner. I did not elude you quickly enough and felt Rebellion’s familiar steel kiss my side, just below the ribs, and the warmth of the blood that followed. Undaunted, I reversed your attack and drove you into a series of acrobatic evasions, always just beyond the point of my well-loved Yamato, who sang joyfully as she slashed the air, as if she were happy to be freed once more from the confines of her gilded home upon my hip.

You escaped, I’ll admit, in a novel enough fashion, lithely leaping up to stand upon the shoulders of a statue of Atlas, so that now he held your considerable weight, as well as that of the world.

An aerial attack was natural from your vantage, and you were ever a devotee of Occam’s Razor, brother, despite having no idea what it was, so I was not disappointed in my expectations. You came slashing downward, and I sidestepped, countering, as your sword struck the flagstones with a ragged clanging. It reverberated across the empty expanse, sending a flock of doves hurtling into the air from some hidden alcove. 

The loud rustling of their wings did not distract me, for I was fixed upon my purpose, but you caught sight of them behind me, and for a nanosecond, the scarcest of moments, I believe you were captivated. I could hardly blame you; I’m sure the picture they made, white against the red hook moon, with the sky like a field of blue-dark velvet, was exquisite.

Unfortunately for you, o my brother, nothing is quite as exquisite as my swordsmanship. I tipped my blade beneath your chin smartly, knocking you back. Instinctively you felt beneath your jaw, glancing at your fingers.

“No blood,” I affirmed, mildly. 

It was a subtle demonstration that was not lost on you.

“Just a love tap, right Verge?” Your voice was lazy, sardonic.

“Something like that.”

“Nice little circus trick.”

“I’m pleased you approve. Now I intended to take my circus in the opposite direction.”

I slashed you twice, and well, painting the masonry with the vivid color of your blood. In its wide swath, it looked like light spilled from the hunter’s moon above, and I was pleased with the artistry of it. I wanted to remark upon that, but you were once more at my throat, so I reluctantly resumed my onslaught.

So it went for some time, o my brother, as it always did—each feeling the strike of the other’s blade. Both of us relishing every blow, either thwarted or landed, for though it never was said, to us pleasure and pain were not entirely unacquainted.

Eventually I got the better of you, predictably, when you slipped up executing what Father called the “million stab” and overshot the target. I sheathed Yamato despite her protests, without breaking stride, and delivered several merciless and concentrated kicks that sent you flying. You fell hard against the weathered base of the courtyard’s center fountain, crumpling in a jagged heap of crimson. I followed at a leisurely stride, keeping my eyes on your struggling form.

And truly, Dante, you were already regrouping. Think what you want of me, brother—I have always admired your fortitude. I redrew my katana and pressed its point to your throat before you could rally.

" _Fiat_ ,” I intoned. " _Factum est_. It’s over, Dante.”

There was a pause.

" _Cedo maiori,_ ” you replied sullenly, and I marveled, as always, at the way you could turn plain Latin into colorful expletives purely by nuance.

Though you said the appropriate words, I doubted very much you meant them. You honored Father’s instruction, and for that I could not fault you. Yet I disliked hearing the requisite phrase from your lips, somehow, and always had. Somehow it always left the golden cup tainted with a bittersweet patina, and I could not fully enjoy my success.

 _I yield to one greater_ was hardly a sentiment you endorsed. One but needed to look you in the eyes to know that. Make no mistake; I relished my victories. I merely disliked having them sullied by disingenuous rote recitals of code. 

“You don’t mean that,” I said, in a low voice. “Don’t speak empty words.”

“It’s the procedure,” you retorted, tightly. “I thought you lived for these little rituals.”

“It’s perjury. There’s no honor in that.”

You glared. “Who’s here to arrest me? The insincerity police?”

“Father always taught us to fight with honor,” I reminded you, coolly. I reached out, offering to help you rise.

“Screw your hand.” Latin niceties dispensed with, you were back in form.

“As the victor, it’s my right to be magnanimous.”

You sighed, looking frustrated, and ran your hand through your disheveled hair. 

“Fine.” Your palm slapped into mine with more anger than enthusiasm.

I hauled you upright, with the assistance of your taut physicality, and now we both stood before the cracked dry fountain, in a courtyard that swirled with leaves.

“Thanks, bro,” you sneered, facetiously.

“Think nothing of it,” I returned, with an icy smile.

“Don’t worry. I won’t.”

We had yet to release each other’s hands, holding fast with a grudge that was rapidly becoming a death grip.

“I’m remembering one of dear old dad’s other sayings,” you said, your pale hair whipping across your face in artful strands, like corn silk after a storm.

“Really. Do share.”

“ ‘Don’t rejoice when your enemy falls—’ ”

“ ‘But don’t pick him up either’ ,” I finished, with a grim smile.

“So you know it.”

Your gaze was accusatory, almost smug, as if you knew you’d proved that I was remiss in my teachings. You looked unusually good when you were being spiteful, for reasons always lost to me.

“I know it,” I replied, my voice the epitome of calm. Our hands were still clenched tightly, and you showed no signs of letting go. It seemed the only thing to do to break the impasse was to pull you forward and off your guard. I did so, abruptly, and you pitched, catching yourself up just short of my face.

I met your furious gaze. “But you,” I said quietly, “are not my enemy.”

Your breath was ragged in the chill air. You hesitated, locking onto my eyes with your own and searching them voraciously—for something, I knew not what. I frowned, mildly displeased that I was unable to read your intentions, o my brother.

Too late it dawned on me.

The hatred in your gaze seemed brittle, for once—fallible—only to re-brighten yet again as you failed to find what you sought. The intention no longer escaped me, for it was a familiarly bred contempt. 

All at once, I knew the profoundest sense of loss. I cannot explain it any better than that. It was the bitterest kind of dispossession, o my brother—not the elementary kind born of merely losing what you’ve always had, but something infinitely more cruel—to forfeit what nearly was, what you held in the palm of your hand, but could not close your fingers over. It pained me, o my brother, somewhere deep and primal. A strange desperation rose inside, tightening my chest, as if my ribcage had decided to strangle my heart. 

It is only natural, to grab for what is lost as it falls away from you, as if you might recapture it once more through sheer force of will. It is only natural for the victor to struggle to keep what should have been his due. _Sic volo, sic iubeo._

I want this, I command this.

 _What is more reasonable than that?_ I asked myself as I reached out to seize the defiant curve of your jaw in the cradle of my palm, as I drew you forward. As I pressed my lips against your unsuspecting mouth.

_Sic._

Just so.

 _…Sic._

Thus.

Your hand shot upward and clenched in my lapel, and I became aware, then, of how fiercely warm your mouth was upon my own, how insistent. If I had expected you to resist, o my brother, I was mistaken. As with all things, you were immediately discontent; tantalized and pushing for more, your hunger bewildering in its intensity, throwing me off my guard. My hand stilled you, bracing against your chest, forcing you to pause, your brow resting against mine, breathing onto my lips in soft, rapid pulses.

And did my hand tremble ever so slightly? I think it did, brother, something it had never done in all my life. I closed my eyes, backtracking, seeking to regain autonomy over myself. What had I said? Where had I left off?

“You,” I repeated, slowly, “Are not my enemy.”

Saying those words helped me regain my composure, and things snapped back into icy focus. You seemed to have recovered senses as well, but your face was unreadable; your eyes averted, as were mine.

“You’re my brother,” I said, “and I am yours.” I shook off your fist. “So let it be for once, Dante.”

For once you had nothing to say, although as I left you there in the silent courtyard, I half expected you to hurl a cocky rejoinder, a taunt, an incredulous demand. But none came.

I did not look back.

You did not follow.

We had not spoken since that evening, and Eva’s misguided meeting of the minds upon ambushing me in the parlor was surely an intuitive maternal reaction. It follows, of course, that if the dauntless and indomitable Dante is behaving unlike himself, the fault must be squarely on the frostbitten shoulders of his icy brother. Vergil, detached and dismissive, not given to affection. _Patris est filius_ , after all; he is his Father’s son.

If she were given one hundred years of solitude to contemplate every possible scenario, Eva would never arrive at the true conclusion—that perhaps I had given you a little too much affection. 

The irony of that demanded appreciation.

I do know that Eva did not presume to suppress our demonic natures, short of keeping mum on pop, as it were. It must have been quite a task, brother, keeping two clueless young devils in some semblance of a line. Father might have guided her, had he but been there. Indeed, I cannot think of a wilder oat to sow among flowers before leaving the field to the mercy of the weeds.

Eva, wife of Sparda, caretaker of the devil’s orchard. 

Would she have still have pleaded with me to go to you, had she known of that unguarded moment? Would she have longed for us to cultivate our brotherly love, if she knew what form of expression it took?

Do you know, I cannot say.

**Author's Note:**

> This story has existed for several years on FF.net. I always meant to re-post it here, but I've been writing a novel and that kind of thing tends to take precedence. However, after playing DmC, all my dormant feelings about demonic twincest have resurged. I thought I'd finally get around to posting it here on Ao3, as I revise each chapter with the benefit of time and hindsight.


End file.
